In 1934 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) was born in the industrial city of Newark, New
Jersey. After attending Howard University in Washington, D. C., he served in the United
States Air Force. In the late fifties he settled in New Yorks Greenwich Village
where he was a central figure of that bohemian scene. He became nationally prominent in
1964, with the New York production of his Obie Award-winning play, Dutchman.
After the death of Malcolm X he became a Black Nationalist, moving first to Harlem and
then back home to Newark. In the mid-1970s, abandoning Cultural Nationalist, he became a
Third World Marxist-Leninist. In 1999, after teaching for twenty years in the Department
of Africana Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook, he retired. However, in retirement he is as
active and productive as an artist and intellectual as he has ever been in his career.
Currently he lives with his wife, the poet Amina Baraka, in Newark.

During his Beat period, when he was known as LeRoi Jones, Baraka lived in New
Yorks Greenwich Village and Lower East Side, where he published important little
magazines such as Yugen and Floating Bear and socialized with such
bohemian figures as [Allen] Ginsberg, Frank OHara, and Gilbert Sorrentino. He was
greatly influenced by the white avant-garde: Charles Olson, OHara, and Ginsberg, in
particular, shaped his conception of a poem as being exploratory and open in form. Donald
Allen records in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 Barakas Beat-period
views on form: "there must not be any preconceived notion or design for what a poem
ought to be. Who knows what a poem ought to sound like? Until its thar
say Charles Olson . . . & I follow closely with that. Im not interested in
writing sonnets, sestinas or anything . . . only poems."

In 1965, following the assassination of black Muslim leader Malcolm X, Baraka left
Greenwich Village and the bohemian world and moved uptown to Harlem and a new life as a
cultural nationalist. He argued in "The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the
Black Nation," (collected in Home) that "Black People are a race, a
culture, a Nation." Turning his back on the white world, he established the Black
Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem, an influential model that inspired black theaters
throughout the country. In 1967, he published his black nationalist collection of poetry, Black
Magic, which traces his painful exit from the white world and his entry into
blackness.

From the "Introduction," to The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader.
Copyright 1991 by William J. Harris

William L. Van Deburg

According to the black poet, contemporary politics proved that the barrel of a gun was
the best voting machine; a dead honkie the most effective protest vote.

Holding to this notion that it sometimes took an inhuman act to end inhumanity,
Afro-American writers defended social violence as necessary to self-defense and
nation-building. Through a show of deadly force, they eventually would be able to
"build up a Black world . . . where there will be not more killing." Just as
important, they said, blacks killed on order to "rebegin"
psychologicallyto alter the "nigger mind." In this view, terrorist bombing
and political assassinations had both tactical and psychosocial consequences. Such acts
chipped away at White Power, but they also helped purge black folk of their
slavery-induced mind-set, wiping away the "skid marks of oppression and /
degradation" in dramatic fashion. As Julius Lester wrote at the time of the Newark
rioting, "Even as we kill, / let us / not forget / that it is only so we maybe / more
human." After shedding white blood in revolutionary action, blacks would find their
own flowing far more freely through spiritually rejuvenated bodies.

In 1974, dramatically reversing himself, Baraka rejected black nationalism as racist
and became a Third World Socialist. He declared, in the New York Times: "It
is a narrow nationalism that says the white man is the enemy . . . Nationalism, so-called,
when it says all non-blacks are our enemies," is sickness or criminality, in
fact, a form of fascism." Since 1974 he has produced a number of Marxist poetry
collections and plays, including Hard Facts, Poetry for the Advanced, and What
Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger and the Means of Production? He has also
published a book of Marxist essays, Daggersand Javelins. The
goal of his socialist art is the destruction of the capitalist state and the creation of a
socialist community. Baraka has stated: "I think fundamentally my intentions are
similar to those I had when I was a Nationalist. That might seem contradictory, but they
were similar in the sense I see art as a weapon, and a weapon of revolution. Its
just now that I define revolution in Marxist terms. Once defined revolution in Nationalist
terms. But I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a Nationalist and
found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as Nationalism was
concerned and had to reach out for a communist ideology." His socialist art is
addressed to the black community, which has, he believes, the greatest revolutionary
potential in America.